“Wanted-An Interpreter-Must Have Tact”

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6901, 6 May 1929, Page 4

“Wanted-An Interpreter-Must Have Tact”

.Mary Borden, brilliant novelist, has been telling readers of the London “Daily Chronicle ” why the average American is puzzled and distracted by English, ways and why, in spite of so'much in common, the people of the two nations fail to understand each other. HE difficulty is not sc much that we Americans do not understand the British, for the fact is .that we understand no nation, not even our own, but that we think we do, when yie don’t. With the Chinese, the Italians, the Indians and the French we have no such confusing illusions. We don’t understand them, and we don’t really .want to. We regard them all more or less as heathens, and we would like to convert them to our own enlightened' outlook, but we don’t for a moment suppose that they are in any way similar to ourselves. The Beginning of Error With you English the case Is quite different. We acknowledge a kinship, and we speak, unfortunately, the ißame language—at any rate, the same official language—and so when we speak we assume that we understand each other and dispense with interpreters. This is a fatal and initial error. The .Same words used alike by Americans and English are quite-different words. .They carry totally different meanings, call to the mind quite different images and start the imagination on divergent voyages. ' To avoid misunderstandings every British statesman should be translated, not quoted, in America, exactly as if he were talking Yiddish. It is the same the other way round. I myself, born and bred in America, find it extremely difficult after 20 years the other side of the Atlantic, to understand the meaning of the editorials in a certain American monthly, although at a superficial glance the

sentences and words seem familiar enough. Sources of Irritation But this is, after all, only a sign of a deeper difficulty, the kind of difficulty that might conceivably arise between two brothers, both captains of industry on a grand scale, one of whom had gone to South Africa while

We leant a language of our own, says ■ Mary Borden. There are some who say I America already has its own language. • the other stayed at home, and who, ’ after 30 years or so, suddenly found ; themselves obliged to co-operate. 1 Their common origin and backr ground and their tie of blood would ■ not, did they become rivals, make for \ harmony. On the contrary, it would [ make for irritation and exasperation, 1 and so it is with the Americans and 3 the English. > We have too much in common to get on easily. There are too many i glaring differences and too many

subtle or deep similarities. We know each other in one sense too well and in another sense too little. We do too many of the same things in totally different ways. All the basic inborn things are the same in us, all our outward expressions of them are different enough to be shocking each to the other. 1 We Americans do not know you ■ English. We know, most of us, almost . nothing about you. The fact is that ; we don’t as yet know ourselves, and we’ve so much to learn about ourselves that we’ve no time for anything else, and to tell the truth we are not, we Americans of the prairies, the Mississippi, the Rockies, or the Western seaboard, in the least bit interested. We pay little attention to what our Government is doing or is saying to yours. We are not really interested in battleships. We think of them as the Government’s toys, something to play with. We despise a little our own globe-trotters, our women who go to Paris, and our men who buy their clothes in Saville Row. We want, when we think of the English, to be free of them and their haunting influence. We want a language of our own, and Broadway is busy making one for us. When we have evolved a new language and a new nation out of our Polaks and Slovaks and Scandinavians and Irish and Germans and Italians, then we’ll talk to you and perhaps listen to you, and perhaps then, when we no longer speak the same tongue, we may understand each other, for there is only a little of the old leaven left in the dough of America, the leaven and yeast of old England, and if it is still strong enough to leaven the paste, it will prove strong enough to save us and the world from disaster. I hear the ice cracking loudly.. I should erase the word disaster, but 1 won't.